I dare hope this will give seasoned C/C++ programmers a place alongside JavaScript programmers at the web development table.
Yeah, nothing thrills me more than the prospect of a language with absolutely no memory safety or bounds checking being exposed to the public Internet. What could possibly go wrong?
The glowing Chinese pigs are using proteins and amino acids that already exist: we found the proteins in an existing animal, probably some deep-sea fish, then took the DNA responsible for the creation for those proteins, and spliced it into the genome of the pigs. Here, they decided on what protein they wanted ahead of time, with plain old chemistry, then crafted a custom DNA sequence for the purpose of creating that protein (apparently creating never-before-used amino acids in the process). Existing protein/DNA transplanted into new animal vs. new protein/DNA built from the ground up.
Here, let me karma whore and try my hand at one o' them car analogies: the first example is like taking the radio out of your truck and putting it in your Volvo, whereas the second example is designing an entirely new kind of playback machine, with the right interface and wires, then wiring it up to the Volvo.
Probably like most people here, my initial reaction was to wonder why the hell an organization that hates science and rational thought is hosting Cosmos, and more importantly, whether they'll turn it into a soapbox for god-knows-what. If Neil Degrasse Tyson is on board though, I'm a little less worried. That man doesn't take any bullshit, and if Fox tries to muscle him into anything, he's going to walk away. That can be your canary in the coal mine to see if the show is worth watching.
Every single time there's a Kinect story, someone has to ask this question. My cynical side wonders whether they'd still be doing this if the Kinect wasn't a Microsoft product, but here's a comment I posted a while back that explains why, even though it may be overrhyped as a video game peripheral, the Kinect is damned cool for robotics applications. The robotics community has, almost overnight, dropped work on many other kinds of input sensors to focus on the Kinect because it's so much more useful (see openni_kinect on ROS for the primary driver, although we'll see if this continues to see love now that an official SDK is out).
Even in theory you can't solve the halting problem on a finite amount of computer time since you can construct programs where the hash function takes an arbitrary (2^(size of memory)) amount of time to loop, and it may not cycle through zero.
Sorry, but this is not correct. In the example you provided, you can determine whether the program will halt or run forever because h, however long it may be, can only take a finite number of values, and so the act of hashing h over and over is guaranteed to be periodic. Just keep running the program, keeping track of which values of h have been generated, until h = 0 (output HALTS) or until you see an already seen value of h (output DOES NOT HALT).
Joking aside, this really has nothing to do with the Halting Problem, because the Halting Problem is a statement about Turing machines, which have unbounded space. Actual computers are not Turing machines: because they have finite memory, they have a finite (though very large) number of states, and are actually finite-state automata.
Here, the Halting Problem doesn't really apply, because if all else fails, you can (in theory) take every combination of programs up to N bits in length, and every combination of inputs up to M bits in length, and make a table of size 2^(N + M) saying whether a given program halts on a given input by running it and looking for a duplicate state. Of course that's impossible in the real world, but it does demonstrate that there's nothing about this research that's violating established principles of computer science.
And in a sense, that seems to be what they're doing here: checking "has this program existed in this exact same state before?", because if it has, you're in an infinite loop. I seriously doubt it's as effective in the real world as they claim though: in my experience infinite loops simply don't happen in computing anymore. If your computer locks up, it's probably because you're in deadlock, or waiting on the disk or the network.
I'd like to point out that "temporal continuity"-- the hypothesis that if things happened this way in the past, they are likely to happen that way in the future-- is a fundamental property of the universe. Without it, we wouldn't have causality, and we could not possibly have science. Without temporal continuity, just because F = ma yesterday, who's to say that it will continue to do so tomorrow?
Obviously I'm not trying to say that the quality of Apple's products is akin to a physical law, but I am saying that believing "Because the previous iPhones were good, the next one is likely to be as well" is not as illogical and a sign of fanboyism as you seem to think. It's a logical, if slightly misguided, extension of something we have to believe in order to function as conscious entities.
Maybe in absolute terms, but virtually any other means of electrical power generation has more. The only moving parts here are the turbines. Not only do we have plenty of experience with running turbines (since every other power source uses them), but they should all be independent from one another, so a failure of one doesn't lead to damage or require a shutdown, it just means you're putting out a little less power.
As for Android tablets, Robert Synnott suggested on Twitter a way to approximate actual tablets sold. First, five days ago Google CEO Larry Page announced that Android was in use on 135 million total devices. Second, Google’s Android developer site publishes a regularly-updated breakdown of the Android OS version numbers in active use. For the 14-day period ending July 5, 0.9 percent of Android devices were using Android 3.0 or 3.1 — a.k.a. Honeycomb, the versions of Android specifically for — and only for — tablets.
Round that up to an even 1 percent to be generous, multiply by 135 million devices, and you get 1.35 million tablets.
So it looks like Apple has sold, to customers, over 21 times more iPads than all Honeycomb Android tablets combined.
These are Google's own numbers here suggesting that the iPad is still eating their lunch.
Actually, Stallman has nothing to do with pushing this project, he thinks it's a waste of time and effort (see Q13). I'm not sure who is fronting this thing, but I want some of their stash.
Not trying to troll here, but why would one use GNU Hurd? What does it offer over Linux? The only fundamental technical difference of note I see is that it's got a microkernel, and arguing about monolithic kernels vs. microkernels is like arguing about vi vs. Emacs: I haven't seen anyone do it seriously, instead of tongue-in-cheek, in years. I imagine there are "non-free" parts of Linux scattered about, and maybe that's a reason to use GNU Hurd, but pretty much all of those are due to device drivers, and making a new OS won't help with that. Even rms admits it's a waste of time. Does Debian really have nothing better to do?
Nothing seems so simple as Time and Attendance software until you to write/consult on/implement Time and Attendance software.
Would you mind going into more detail as to why? I have to admit, this is one of those things I've always been curious about. It always seemed to me that this should be one of those things that any decent team can crank out in a year, yet I've heard disaster story after disaster story about software like this and so clearly there's something I'm missing here. Is the actual software more difficult to design than I thought, or is it the fact that these are usually government projects, with all the additional requirements therein?
Yes, but this doesn't matter because the device could be lying. It's always possible for the controller to pretend to be something it isn't. In theory, you could have a device with a time delay in hardware that starts issuing malicious commands only after you go home for the night. Software would never pick it up.
"all rights to individual privacy"? No, of course not. No one is arguing that we should have the right to watch police officers or government officials when they're at home with their kids, that's stupid. We're saying there should be no expectation of privacy while they're on the job performing a public service, with public money.
The best part about that label was that it was slightly different in the UK: there, it said, "Do not chew iPod shuffle" instead
Just goes to show you what Apple thinks about our intelligence: us dumb Americans would actually swallow the iPod, whereas the rest of the world is much smarter and would only munch on it.
I don't see how it is unreasonable for Google to promote their own brand on their page.
And Microsoft probably didn't see why it was unreasonable to promote their own browser on their operating system. Antitrust legislation is about more than promotion: it prevents you from your dominance in one market to muscle competitors out of a different market. Whether or not Google is actually running afoul of antitrust laws, I don't know, but it's definitely a possibility: you don't think it's possible that so many people are using Google Docs instead of other cloud document editing services because it's right on Google's homepage?
I'm all-too-aware of this issue and how quickly it sucks the life out of you and prevents anything from getting done, but at the same time obviously having no process doesn't lead to stellar code either. My question is, do any of you work in a place where you think you've struck the right balance? What are you doing?
Don't do this. As illogical as uppity Slashdot "power users" think it is, IT departments hate it when people upgrade their machines without consulting them. Full-time employees, they'd probably be willing to let it slide after a stern talk, but for interns? No guarantees.
As for keeping memory usage down, Opera 9 is a good bet (10 is a little heavier), but no matter what browser you use, you may have to change your browsing habits a little. Loads of tabs open is going to eat up memory no matter what browser you're on, and all of them have memory leaks to some extent (though none quite so bad as Firefox...), so you may want to set your browser to "reopen the tabs I had last" on startup, and just quit-restart every now and then.
I'm a computer scientist in the middle of getting my BA, but for research experience or in the process of taking an elective, I've spent time with grad students in other departments- mostly biology and linguistics- and the software they write. Smart people? Absolutely- they're experts in their field. But they can't write code to save their lives. I've seen things that make me want to run screaming to TheDailyWTF and the quality software engineering on display there;)
I don't think this is a bad thing, myself. Most of this code is single-use only, being written for a specific purpose (or a specific thesis paper), and will never be used again. Not to mention they're taking enough time to get their degrees as it is- I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to become expert software engineers as well. OP claims that taxpayer dollars are being wasted, but think how much waste there'd be if every researcher had to get a CS degree before they started in their own field, too.
Useful though it may be, it's very clearly against Dropbox's Terms of Service. That doesn't give them the right to issue takedown notices to other sites on copyright grounds, but let's separate, "evil for issuing fake takedown notices" (which they are), from "evil for wanting to prevent this kind of activity" (which is perfectly reasonable).
They're not running a filesharing service, that's not their business model, and they don't want to end up like Rapidshare or any of the N other filesharing services in legal hot water. I love Dropbox, and I would hate to see one of it's most useful features- public collaboration folders- shut down because some asshats can't obey the TOS and just use torrents instead. Dropbox should be trying to find a technical solution to block something like this, but if that's not possible, what can they do?
It may not be an atom, but they did produce two antiprotons and two antineutrons bound by the strong force. AFAIK that's never been observed before, and it does count for something. Also, the heavier these things are, the easier they are to cool, so it may not be long before someone can produce "real" antihelium.
You mean that thing that's supposed to be superior to the World Wide Web, but that's been in development hell for the last fifty years? (Duke Nukem Forever, most delayed software ever? Ha.) Someone needs to tell this guy that it doesn't matter how superior your invention is if no one ever sees it. Like Steve Jobs said, "Real artists ship."
In addition, the physicists of the University of Innsbruck have found out that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, as usually expected, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits. When several particles are entangled, the sensitivity of the system increases significantly.
This is somewhat troubling, isn't it? If the decay rate is quadratic in the number of qubits, and this turns out to be due to some fundamental physical law as opposed to limitations of the current technology, does that mean we can never have quantum computers with any significant amount of memory?
Slashdot Mirror
I dare hope this will give seasoned C/C++ programmers a place alongside JavaScript programmers at the web development table.
Yeah, nothing thrills me more than the prospect of a language with absolutely no memory safety or bounds checking being exposed to the public Internet. What could possibly go wrong?
The glowing Chinese pigs are using proteins and amino acids that already exist: we found the proteins in an existing animal, probably some deep-sea fish, then took the DNA responsible for the creation for those proteins, and spliced it into the genome of the pigs. Here, they decided on what protein they wanted ahead of time, with plain old chemistry, then crafted a custom DNA sequence for the purpose of creating that protein (apparently creating never-before-used amino acids in the process). Existing protein/DNA transplanted into new animal vs. new protein/DNA built from the ground up.
Here, let me karma whore and try my hand at one o' them car analogies: the first example is like taking the radio out of your truck and putting it in your Volvo, whereas the second example is designing an entirely new kind of playback machine, with the right interface and wires, then wiring it up to the Volvo.
Probably like most people here, my initial reaction was to wonder why the hell an organization that hates science and rational thought is hosting Cosmos, and more importantly, whether they'll turn it into a soapbox for god-knows-what. If Neil Degrasse Tyson is on board though, I'm a little less worried. That man doesn't take any bullshit, and if Fox tries to muscle him into anything, he's going to walk away. That can be your canary in the coal mine to see if the show is worth watching.
Every single time there's a Kinect story, someone has to ask this question. My cynical side wonders whether they'd still be doing this if the Kinect wasn't a Microsoft product, but here's a comment I posted a while back that explains why, even though it may be overrhyped as a video game peripheral, the Kinect is damned cool for robotics applications. The robotics community has, almost overnight, dropped work on many other kinds of input sensors to focus on the Kinect because it's so much more useful (see openni_kinect on ROS for the primary driver, although we'll see if this continues to see love now that an official SDK is out).
Even in theory you can't solve the halting problem on a finite amount of computer time since you can construct programs where the hash function takes an arbitrary (2^(size of memory)) amount of time to loop, and it may not cycle through zero.
Sorry, but this is not correct. In the example you provided, you can determine whether the program will halt or run forever because h, however long it may be, can only take a finite number of values, and so the act of hashing h over and over is guaranteed to be periodic. Just keep running the program, keeping track of which values of h have been generated, until h = 0 (output HALTS) or until you see an already seen value of h (output DOES NOT HALT).
Joking aside, this really has nothing to do with the Halting Problem, because the Halting Problem is a statement about Turing machines, which have unbounded space. Actual computers are not Turing machines: because they have finite memory, they have a finite (though very large) number of states, and are actually finite-state automata.
Here, the Halting Problem doesn't really apply, because if all else fails, you can (in theory) take every combination of programs up to N bits in length, and every combination of inputs up to M bits in length, and make a table of size 2^(N + M) saying whether a given program halts on a given input by running it and looking for a duplicate state. Of course that's impossible in the real world, but it does demonstrate that there's nothing about this research that's violating established principles of computer science.
And in a sense, that seems to be what they're doing here: checking "has this program existed in this exact same state before?", because if it has, you're in an infinite loop. I seriously doubt it's as effective in the real world as they claim though: in my experience infinite loops simply don't happen in computing anymore. If your computer locks up, it's probably because you're in deadlock, or waiting on the disk or the network.
Yes
It's a good thing people gave Stallman that katana after the xkcd strip came out, because there's now only one option. Reclaim your honor, sir.
I'd like to point out that "temporal continuity"-- the hypothesis that if things happened this way in the past, they are likely to happen that way in the future-- is a fundamental property of the universe. Without it, we wouldn't have causality, and we could not possibly have science. Without temporal continuity, just because F = ma yesterday, who's to say that it will continue to do so tomorrow?
Obviously I'm not trying to say that the quality of Apple's products is akin to a physical law, but I am saying that believing "Because the previous iPhones were good, the next one is likely to be as well" is not as illogical and a sign of fanboyism as you seem to think. It's a logical, if slightly misguided, extension of something we have to believe in order to function as conscious entities.
lots of moving parts
Maybe in absolute terms, but virtually any other means of electrical power generation has more. The only moving parts here are the turbines. Not only do we have plenty of experience with running turbines (since every other power source uses them), but they should all be independent from one another, so a failure of one doesn't lead to damage or require a shutdown, it just means you're putting out a little less power.
As for Android tablets, Robert Synnott suggested on Twitter a way to approximate actual tablets sold. First, five days ago Google CEO Larry Page announced that Android was in use on 135 million total devices. Second, Google’s Android developer site publishes a regularly-updated breakdown of the Android OS version numbers in active use. For the 14-day period ending July 5, 0.9 percent of Android devices were using Android 3.0 or 3.1 — a.k.a. Honeycomb, the versions of Android specifically for — and only for — tablets.
Round that up to an even 1 percent to be generous, multiply by 135 million devices, and you get 1.35 million tablets.
So it looks like Apple has sold, to customers, over 21 times more iPads than all Honeycomb Android tablets combined.
These are Google's own numbers here suggesting that the iPad is still eating their lunch.
Actually, Stallman has nothing to do with pushing this project, he thinks it's a waste of time and effort (see Q13). I'm not sure who is fronting this thing, but I want some of their stash.
Not trying to troll here, but why would one use GNU Hurd? What does it offer over Linux? The only fundamental technical difference of note I see is that it's got a microkernel, and arguing about monolithic kernels vs. microkernels is like arguing about vi vs. Emacs: I haven't seen anyone do it seriously, instead of tongue-in-cheek, in years. I imagine there are "non-free" parts of Linux scattered about, and maybe that's a reason to use GNU Hurd, but pretty much all of those are due to device drivers, and making a new OS won't help with that. Even rms admits it's a waste of time. Does Debian really have nothing better to do?
Nothing seems so simple as Time and Attendance software until you to write/consult on/implement Time and Attendance software.
Would you mind going into more detail as to why? I have to admit, this is one of those things I've always been curious about. It always seemed to me that this should be one of those things that any decent team can crank out in a year, yet I've heard disaster story after disaster story about software like this and so clearly there's something I'm missing here. Is the actual software more difficult to design than I thought, or is it the fact that these are usually government projects, with all the additional requirements therein?
Yes, but this doesn't matter because the device could be lying. It's always possible for the controller to pretend to be something it isn't. In theory, you could have a device with a time delay in hardware that starts issuing malicious commands only after you go home for the night. Software would never pick it up.
"all rights to individual privacy"? No, of course not. No one is arguing that we should have the right to watch police officers or government officials when they're at home with their kids, that's stupid. We're saying there should be no expectation of privacy while they're on the job performing a public service, with public money.
The best part about that label was that it was slightly different in the UK: there, it said, "Do not chew iPod shuffle" instead
Just goes to show you what Apple thinks about our intelligence: us dumb Americans would actually swallow the iPod, whereas the rest of the world is much smarter and would only munch on it.
I don't see how it is unreasonable for Google to promote their own brand on their page.
And Microsoft probably didn't see why it was unreasonable to promote their own browser on their operating system. Antitrust legislation is about more than promotion: it prevents you from your dominance in one market to muscle competitors out of a different market. Whether or not Google is actually running afoul of antitrust laws, I don't know, but it's definitely a possibility: you don't think it's possible that so many people are using Google Docs instead of other cloud document editing services because it's right on Google's homepage?
I'm all-too-aware of this issue and how quickly it sucks the life out of you and prevents anything from getting done, but at the same time obviously having no process doesn't lead to stellar code either. My question is, do any of you work in a place where you think you've struck the right balance? What are you doing?
Don't do this. As illogical as uppity Slashdot "power users" think it is, IT departments hate it when people upgrade their machines without consulting them. Full-time employees, they'd probably be willing to let it slide after a stern talk, but for interns? No guarantees.
As for keeping memory usage down, Opera 9 is a good bet (10 is a little heavier), but no matter what browser you use, you may have to change your browsing habits a little. Loads of tabs open is going to eat up memory no matter what browser you're on, and all of them have memory leaks to some extent (though none quite so bad as Firefox...), so you may want to set your browser to "reopen the tabs I had last" on startup, and just quit-restart every now and then.
I'm a computer scientist in the middle of getting my BA, but for research experience or in the process of taking an elective, I've spent time with grad students in other departments- mostly biology and linguistics- and the software they write. Smart people? Absolutely- they're experts in their field. But they can't write code to save their lives. I've seen things that make me want to run screaming to TheDailyWTF and the quality software engineering on display there ;)
I don't think this is a bad thing, myself. Most of this code is single-use only, being written for a specific purpose (or a specific thesis paper), and will never be used again. Not to mention they're taking enough time to get their degrees as it is- I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to become expert software engineers as well. OP claims that taxpayer dollars are being wasted, but think how much waste there'd be if every researcher had to get a CS degree before they started in their own field, too.
Useful though it may be, it's very clearly against Dropbox's Terms of Service. That doesn't give them the right to issue takedown notices to other sites on copyright grounds, but let's separate, "evil for issuing fake takedown notices" (which they are), from "evil for wanting to prevent this kind of activity" (which is perfectly reasonable).
They're not running a filesharing service, that's not their business model, and they don't want to end up like Rapidshare or any of the N other filesharing services in legal hot water. I love Dropbox, and I would hate to see one of it's most useful features- public collaboration folders- shut down because some asshats can't obey the TOS and just use torrents instead. Dropbox should be trying to find a technical solution to block something like this, but if that's not possible, what can they do?
It may not be an atom, but they did produce two antiprotons and two antineutrons bound by the strong force. AFAIK that's never been observed before, and it does count for something. Also, the heavier these things are, the easier they are to cool, so it may not be long before someone can produce "real" antihelium.
You mean that thing that's supposed to be superior to the World Wide Web, but that's been in development hell for the last fifty years? (Duke Nukem Forever, most delayed software ever? Ha.) Someone needs to tell this guy that it doesn't matter how superior your invention is if no one ever sees it. Like Steve Jobs said, "Real artists ship."
In addition, the physicists of the University of Innsbruck have found out that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, as usually expected, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits. When several particles are entangled, the sensitivity of the system increases significantly.
This is somewhat troubling, isn't it? If the decay rate is quadratic in the number of qubits, and this turns out to be due to some fundamental physical law as opposed to limitations of the current technology, does that mean we can never have quantum computers with any significant amount of memory?